I show that case syncretism obeys the same *ABA restriction previously observed in case-sensitive suppletion: no Vocabulary-Insertion rule can apply to both an inherent case and an unmarked core case (nominative/absolutive) without also applying to another core case (accusative/ergative). The case hierarchy that these effects motivate is one where the ergative is consistently put in the same box as the accusative, separately from all inherent cases. This offers a new kind of argument in favor of dependent-case theories, whereby accusative and ergative are both structurallyassigned to nominals that stand in an asymmetric c-command relation to another as-yet-caseless nominal nearby.

The nominative, the accusative and the dative have been recently argued to stand in proper containment to one another. In contrast to more traditional decompositions which posited no such containment, this new decomposition has been shown to account for the absence of ABA exponence patterns for this triplet of cases, i.e. for the fact that no rule of exponence applies in both nominative and dative without also applying in the accusative. We point out that, in addition to its desirable predictions regarding *ABA, the more recent decomposition also makes an undesirable prediction about the derivation of ABB patterns, as we show based on data from Indo-European languages. We argue that a third theory—under which the accusative is properly contained within the dative, but the nominative and the accusative do not stand in a containment relation to one another—accounts for all the relevant facts.

No abstract